Archive for the ‘Design Related’ Category

I get a lot of requests from customers asking us to make them a banner, video or even creating a very sophisticated header with moving images. One thing that we don’t do is to claim that we are good at something we are not. Our company is not a professional design company, we are a professional marketing and software company specializing in sports handicapping and online gaming. We do designs for our clients when they setup new website. Typically the designs that we do are basic and functional (always static) but they incorporate no moving elements (animated elements) using technologies such as Flash. The reason? We simply are not the best choice.

Our responsibility is to provide our customers with the best advice. The best advice we can give them when getting a design made is to outsource it to a professional. Here are a two places where you can get designs done:

1. Fiverr – This is a the low-end and the quality can vary but for $5 it’s worth a try. Don’t expect great work but you may get lucky.

2. 99Designs – Wildly popular service that matches you up with professional designers and puts your project in front of them in a contest-style environment where you get to choose the best design. Most designers on here are experienced professionals.

Although we can do designs for clients, it will cost far more since it takes us far longer to do the same thing as the professional designers on these sites.

Banner Specifications

When you get a design made you’ll need to provide to them the size specifications. Here they are.

Banners Images:

The horizontal banners on all of our sites are 728×90 pixels

The vertical banners on our site are either 120×240 (eg. Register Page) and 120×600 pixels (other pages)

I get a lot of questions asking how to add an image to the body content. The first thing you must know is that to do this you must access the html editor. You access it by clicking on the HTML button (click on the image below). In the html code you must link the image you want to where you are hosting it. There are plenty of places which do free image hosting. A quick search on Google shows the following services that host images for free:

http://imageshack.us/

http://tinypic.com/

Step 1. Once you upload your image to these services you will obtain a URL where you will use in your HTML code. Once you reference this image in the html code via your html editor, your body text will show the image.

There are two options to get this image into your page:

Basic Users: Use the Image Editor

Step 2 – Select the Insert Image button and paste the url from Step 1 into the Image URL box. The other two boxes are optional. After inserting it, save the page and the image should show.

Adding a link

If you want to add a hyperlink to the image simply select the image link button and it copy and paste the URL (e.g. http://www.google.com) to the page you want to link to.

Advanced users: Use the HTML Editor

Step 2. Take the url of the image and insert it into the HTML Code. If you don’t know HTML you can browse the net for more details. It’s very easy to use and many programs like Microsoft Word will automatically convert it for you. For a very basic primer refer to: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/

Login to your control panel and find the “Manage Access Plans” section. Click “Add New Access Plan” and specify the information for your access plan including Name, Price, Colors etc. Copy and paste the code you obtained in step 1, into the box “Payment Button Script”. (See image on this post)

Click the “Edit Access Plan” button to save.

Your button should show on your Access Plans page.

For sample references of how our other clients setup their access plans visit our client page here and click on Access Plans to see how they have set it up.

We have clients that wish to setup their own website. In order to this you need to change a set of 8 files. For the purposes of this example, I will reference the demo site system that can be found here http://demo.ezcapper.com/

The header.jpg file is 900×165 pixels and this is the main banner on the home page.

The header consists of two files wit the second file being headerBack2.jpg (900×46 pixels). This file is a tricky file as it connects the header to the menu system. More….

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